I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.

Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.